The earliest certain textual evidence relating to the South Slavic oral epic tradition that has been discovered up to the present is a little less than five hundred years old. That earliest scrap of evidence has come down to us in literary learning as the result of a conscious act of collection by an Italian to whom not only the poetry itself but also the dialects of the South Slavs were entirely foreign. What was true of him in his time has remained true in principle of all the collecting activity by all the collectors who have recorded oral traditional epic poetry in the South Slavic world ever since: collecting has, by its very nature, been the act of outsiders to whom the tradition was essentially strange, who nevertheless were interested in it as though it were literature, and who did not understand it. Thus the whole history of knowledge about the South Slavic oral traditional epos has been shaped by three constant factors: 1. The tradition has been substantially alien to all its cognoscenti, regardless of their nationalities. 2. It has been valued and acquisitively pursued by them for its perceived literary features. 3. But the possession of texts from the tradition, no matter how the collecting has been done, has continued always to pose some of the most difficult historical and analytical problems known to literary science; namely the questions of how, why, and when narrative poetry arose in human culture to begin with, which of its original characteristics have remained constant in the life of such traditions, and what they disclose about the nature and history of the human mind. Those questions are all as unanswered today as they were five hundred years ago, and are indeed all now far more problematical than ever before.--Page 302.David E. Bynum (Cleveland State University) was trained in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University. His The Daemon in the Wood: A Study of Oral Narrative Patterns (1978) treated the motif of the two trees in the world's folk literature. Dr. Bynum is also an editor of the Parry Collection series Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs
